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<title>The Social Role of Sorcery by Tulip (MoonlitClouds)</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23286145">The Social Role of Sorcery</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoonlitClouds/pseuds/Tulip'>Tulip (MoonlitClouds)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Frozen (Disney Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Meta, Nonfiction, Politics, Written before Frozen 2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 10:33:48</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>730</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23286145</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoonlitClouds/pseuds/Tulip</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Some extrapolations regarding the social role of sorcery in Frozen and the Duke of Weselton’s opinions on Elsa. Originally written before the release of Frozen 2, and so contains no reference to information revealed therein, but not obviously invalidated by it either.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>March Meta Matters Challenge</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Social Role of Sorcery</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Some extrapolations regarding the social role of sorcery in Frozen and the Duke of Weselton’s opinions on Elsa:</p><p>When Elsa first loses control of her magic at the party, the Duke of Weselton doesn’t jump immediately to calling her a monster; that only starts when she (accidentally) attacks him in particular. His comment when her magic is first revealed is less extreme: “Sorcery. I knew there was something dubious going on here.” So, while most of the readings of the scene that I’ve encountered assume him to be prejudiced against sorcerers a la mutants from X-Men, I’m not sure that reading is correct.</p><p>When Elsa freezes everything, it leaves Arendelle in extremely bad shape. While some of that can be put down to just lack of time to prepare for winter-type conditions, it’s heavily implied that it’s more extreme than even typical Arendellian winters; there’s a scene of some citizens arguing over how to arrange their firewood piles to keep them as dry as possible, and if ordinary local winters were comparable I’d expect that sort of thing to already be common knowledge. This is <em>before</em> the movie’s finale starts and the freezing-and-gentle-snow escalates into a full-fledged blizzard.</p><p>It’s clear that sorcery, while not <em>common</em>, isn’t <em>unknown</em> either. It’s not just the trolls who know about it; the Duke responds to the reveal of Elsa’s powers, not with “aaaa magic is real”, but with “I knew there was something dubious going on here”.</p><p>Can we assume that most sorcerers are comparably powerful to Elsa? Probably not. Especially if we take the Rapunzel cameo as indicating Frozen takes place in the same world as Tangled, Rapunzel’s healing would most likely count as ‘sorcery’ too, and is pretty clearly in a different weight class from Elsa’s. But can we assume that there are <em>some</em> sorcerers comparably powerful to Elsa? That seems like a much safer assumption.</p><p>And any sorcerers within that power range are effectively superweapons relative to the other technologies available to the world. Elsa can immobilize ships; she can, as demonstrated in the fight scene in the tower, shield herself from direct weapon attacks; although it never comes up in the movie proper, she could almost certainly crush siege weapons (and armies, for that matter) under too much snow to operate. While the details of how other sorcerers would fight might vary, the general picture—people whose magic is more powerful than the best nonmagical weaponry anyone can bring to bear—is a telling one.</p><p>This has almost certainly influenced standard practice in the world’s warfare; there’s no way anybody would try to invade a sorcerously-protected region without magical support of their own. And, conversely, any country with access to high-powered magic while their opponents have none would have a <em>massive</em> advantage in any attempted invasion.</p><p>Now, why would Elsa secretly being a sorcerer be “something dubious” in the Duke of Weselton’s eyes? Because he lacks the context on why she’s keeping her powers hidden. He doesn’t know Elsa nearly well enough to come up with the hypothesis of “she’s afraid of hurting people if she lets loose”; and, without that particular hypothesis, the reveal comes across as Arendelle hiding a superweapon for unknown purposes.</p><p>Hidden superweapons are scary. If they just wanted to deter invasion, they wouldn’t hide her; maybe they would hide her precise identity, but they would make it clear that they had <em>someone</em> capable of large-scale ice-manipulation, to ensure that nobody tried to invade them on the mistaken assumption that they were undefended. That they instead hid that there was a sorcerer in Arendelle at all? That suggests that they wanted to be seen as harmless; and why do that unless they were plotting invasions of their own?</p><p>So I don’t think the Duke’s fear of Elsa is founded on simple prejudice; rather, I think he misreads the secrecy of her powers as implying that Arendelle is plotting to invade other countries—potentially including Weselton—and that his fears are escalated when she (he thinks) directly attacks him.</p><p>(A further point in favor of the it’s-not-prejudice conclusion: note that he still sounds shocked when Hans says that Elsa killed Anna. He may have been personally terrified of her, but he didn’t think she was Generically Evil in any sense broad enough for killing her sister to be within the range of actions he expected from her.)</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Mirrored to AO3 (originally on <a href="https://moonlit-tulip.tumblr.com/post/172040056073/some-extrapolations-regarding-the-social-role-of">Tumblr</a>) as part of the <a href="https://marchmetamatterschallenge.dreamwidth.org/">March Meta Matters Challenge</a>.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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